John Butler's Contributions

Two years ago, prior to travelling to Sydney to present at the Annual Precious Metals Symposium, I prepared an article for the Gold Standard Institute Journal titled Cognitive Dollar Dissonance: Why a Global De-Leveraging Requires the De-Rating of the Dollar and the Remonetization of Gold...

At a recent conference hosted by a major global bank in London I sat on a panel alongside a macro investment strategist who referred to the euro as a ‘Trojan horse’ intended to force fiscal austerity on...

A former RAF aviation engineer and software engineer in the financial sector, Steve Baker has been the Conservative MP for Wycombe, Buckinghamshire since 2010. Recently he was elected by his colleagues to the...

Recent dollar strength has been a surprise to many but a strong dollar was also a key component of the Asian currency crises of 1997-98. These contributed to sharply lower oil prices, which in turn helped to trigger the 1998 Russian debt default...

The topic of ‘currency war’ has been bantered about in financial circles since at least the term was first used by Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega in September 2010. Recently, the currency war has escalated, and a ‘sanctions war’ against Russia has broken out.

With few exceptions, commodity prices have fallen sharply in recent months, to their lowest levels in over a year. Relative to stock market indices, broad commodity indices are now at their lowest levels since the late-1990s dotcom boom.

In this report, I present a plan, inspired by the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ of the 18th century, that would enable the Scots, probably in less than six years, to become the most prosperous Anglosphere region in the world. It won’t be easy, but then the easy isn’t for the brave.

The Death of Money, Jim Rickards’ second book, has met with widespread acclaim. In it, Jim refines and develops multiple topics raised in his first book, Currency Wars, as well as adding some intriguing new material regarding the role of intelligence agencies in international financial and monetary affairs.

Although it might seem odd for a school of economics to largely ignore the role of money in the economy, this is indeed the case with traditional Keynesian economics. Declaring in 1963 that, “Inflation is, always and everywhere, a monetary phenomenon,”

Commodities are the most basic economic goods, providing essential inputs into progressively more complex goods at advanced stages of production. Yet the economic mainstream generally fails to understand commodities, treating them as distinct from the processes whereby they are created and...

Friedrich Hayek was the first Austrian School economist to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. Yet Hayek took issue with the characterization of modern economics as a ‘science’ in the conventional sense. This is because the scientific method requires theories to be falsifiable and repeatable under stable conditions.

In that rare moment, when prices soar, it might be tempting to shoot the messenger—blame the speculator—but this is unfair. Sometimes they take big risks. Sometimes they take huge losses or reap huge rewards.